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3. Benchmark your progress and strategies against peers: locally, nationally, and internationally. Increasingly, to have an impact locally, to forge a distinctive contribution and reputation, depends on national and international profile, relevance, and quality. 4. Understand, value, and develop your talent. There is no substitute. 5. Network to create shared value, to gain knowledge and experience. 6. Don’t play it safe. This fosters mediocrity, which, in a competitive environment, leads to decay. Leave plenty of room to take risks. I would like to close simply by thanking each of you. You, our librarians, truly lead the way in grappling with the extraordinary pace and nature of strategic opportunities that all of our universities now face. This revolution we are living through is all about information, and through whatever self- determined or entirely random way you come to it, information, and information management, is your domain, and, our temple. Out there, on the front lines of the information revolution, you lead. I thank you for the work you do, for the doors you have opened and the paths you have charted, and are charting—both on behalf of the institutions you serve, and, for the countless knowledge-hungry minds who have the great good fortune to walk into your world. 1 Norman R. Augustine et al., Rising above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5 (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2010), 6–9, http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12999. 2 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Main Science and Technology Indicators, vol. 2010/1 (Paris: OECD, 2010), 25. 3 Ibid. 4 OECD, Education at a Glance 2010: OECD Indicators (Paris: OECD, 2010), 61, table A3.2, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/888932310130. 5 Ibid. 6 According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics online Data Center custom tables, China’s tertiary graduation numbers were 1,775,999 in 2000 and 7,716,957 in 2009; see http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/document.aspx?ReportId=143&IF_Language=eng. 7 OECD, The OECD Innovation Strategy: Getting a Head Start on Tomorrow (Paris: OECD, 2010), 45, http://www.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/display.asp?sf1=identifiers&st1=9789264084704. 8 OECD, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2009 (Paris: OECD, 2009), 17, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/sti_scoreboard-2009-en. 9 “IMD 2010 World Competitiveness Yearbook rankings,” IMD news release, May 19, 2010, http://www.imd.org/news/IMD-World-Competitiveness-Yearbook-2010-Rankings.cfm. 10 Klaus Schwab, The Global Competitiveness Report, 2010–2011 (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2010), 14, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalCompetitivenessReport_2010-11.pdf. RLI 276 10 Ahead of the Storm: Research Libraries and the Future of the Research University ( C O N T I N U E D ) SEPTEMBER 2011 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A QUARTERLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC